


hearing, seeing

by kwritten



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 상속자들 | The Heirs
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, Crossover Pairings, F/F, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:23:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what they don't tell you in the storybooks is what to do with the princess after you've rescued her (set in the summer between S5/6 and in the first episode of the Heirs)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. whiskey and hot sauce in strawberry shakes

Spike takes Dawn on a roadtrip.  
  
They don't take much with them. She's pretty sure he didn't even know they were leaving. Surely they didn't leave a note. Vampires don't leave notes when they breeze out of town in the middle of the night.  
  
She gathers this factoid from the number of times Spike has drunkenly rolled himself onto her floor, falling asleep while telling the story of Drusilla leaving him for the hundredth time. And the riddle is always the same: Vampires don't leave notes when they leave for no reason.  
  
The underlying answer there, she realizes as she pulls a blanket over his shoulders and throws a pillow at his head before falling asleep again, is that humans (Slayers) are supposed to leave a note, damnit.  
  
She can't help but agree.  
  
  
He doesn't say where they are going and the house is empty so she doesn't argue - or really get invited. But what else is she supposed to do on a Wednesday night in the middle of Southern California summer?  
  
They leave around eight thirty. It's a little early for him, there's still some sun on the horizon. He gets on the freeway and then lets her drive. They drive in shifts. No one mentions that she shouldn't be driving at only fifteen. (She's ancient actually.) No one mentions the half-empty bottle of whiskey in his hand. They avoid each other's eyes when she takes it from him and it is empty. (They're heartbroken actually.)  
  
  
  
They stop in Barstow so she can pee and he can eat.  
  
She watches him wipe the blood from his mouth. She's not sure how he did it - there's the chip and all - but also a staggering woman walking away with her hand on her throat. She looks him straight in his blue eyes.  
  
"Kay, well now you owe me french fries."  
  
He buys the strawberry shakes without her asking. They add hot sauce to them that he keeps in his glove department now. She dips her cheeseburger in hers and he adds onion rings to his. And they turn south and keep driving.  
  
  
  
  
She makes him end in San Diego because it seems wiser than to keep going. She thinks they were originally headed to Vegas. Oh well, he can hang out in a bar while she sunbathes.  
  
He steals her a swimsuit first. One that makes her look a good three years older (he promises), one that makes her feel like someone who isn't too young and too old and has run away because she and her pet vampire are sad. It's red and it falls deep between her breasts, but is still sporty in a way that makes her feel like it belongs to her.  
  
She deposits him at a bar with no windows open all day. She ignores the looks of the patrons. She kisses him on the cheek before she leaves.  
  
He'll probably eat someone else today. Oh well. That's what you get for taking in a serial killer.  
  
  
  
  
There's a nice beach side restaurant that doesn't care she's not really wearing anything. She gulps down black coffee and eats too many waffles with raspberry jam and ketchup. She swings her leg and watches the people surf in the sun.  
  
There's a phonebooth and so she does the responsible thing. The adult thing. The thing she's supposed to do.  
  
She leaves a note.  
  
  
  
  
"Uh hi Will."  
"Dawnie? Aren't you at school?"  
"Oh um... yeah..."  
"Did you forget something?"  
"No Will, just... I might be home late."  
"I don't know... it's not safe."  
"Spike can pick me up."  
"Okay well see you tonight then."  
"Will?"  
"Dawnie I'm pretty busy... something else?"  
"...."  
"Dawn?"  
"No Will. See you tonight."  
  
  
  
She's not even surprised they don't realize that she's gone. She's so pathetic thinking that...  
  
  
  
At that moment, Dawn watches a girl (a couple years older than her maybe) run after another girl, clutching a suitcase. She can't stop staring as they fight. There's something in her that perversely  _needs_ to see what happens next.  
  
It's ugly.  
  
Ugly, snotty crying on a sidewalk.  
  
And Dawn is standing half a football field away, just watching.  
  
  
  
 _She can nearly feel the wind whipping around her hair and the lurch of her heart as her hand suddenly becomes cold because the hand that was there is running away from her and she can hear the monsters coming, they are right on the edge and then everything is silence and silence and silence. She should have yelled and fought and screamed. She should have ..._  
  
  
  
This girl, Dawn acknowledges ruefully, is anything but silent. She's loud. Too loud. Tears stream down from Dawn's face in empathy, just from the sound.  
  
  
  
She's never heard a heart break, but she's seen it and she's felt it so she knows what it is.  
  
  
  
The phone is still clutched in her hand and it is her lifeline to her life and to Willow and to Sunnydale and to her tower and...  
  
What the fuck is she thinking?  
  
Dawn doesn't even wipe her eyes, just marches straight over to the girl, leaves the phone dangling in flux forever behind her, and begins shoving the articles of clothing back in the open suitcase.  
  
She climbed out of her own damn tower in the silence but somehow she's still up there waiting for her sister, her hero, to guide her down.  
  
  
  
Well fuck that, her sister is dead and there's no such things as heroes anymore, just whiskey and hot sauce in strawberry shakes and blood where it shouldn't be and being forgotten.  
  
  
  
When the hero climbs up the tower, they aren't supposed to leave you behind.  
  
So Dawn packs up the baggage and she settles her shoulders and takes the girl's hand.  
  
  
 _So I'm the fucking hero now. Betcha wish you could stop me, huh sis?_


	2. madness takes you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eunsang-centric   
> warnings: blood

There was a moment there - a milisecond or a lifetime of moments she isn't sure - where she could have been the damsel in distress. Standing there in her pain with all her weakness exposed - she was daring a white knight to come to her rescue.  
  
She got a girl in a red bikini instead.  
  
She stood there and cried big, loud sobs - her last attempt to call her dreams back to her so that she could feel brave and resolute again.  
  
(Watch her story shift. This is the good part.)  
  
She didn't even notice the girl stride over and repack her suitcase, though later a memory of dark hair and blue eyes filled with tears would erupt out of the initial flash of red and white, but she never asked why the girl was crying. There were certain questions they never had to ask each other. There were others that they didn't dare.  
  
  
  
  
There are a million ways that a moment can end.  
  
That she chose to swallow her sobs and take the long, lean hand offered her never felt like the wrong choice.  
  
  
  
  
(In the back recesses of her mind there is an image of a prince or two and she is a damsel with long, beautiful hair...)  
  
  
They end up in a dark bar and a beer is set in front of her and the girl claps her on the back sympathetically.  
  
They eat greasy bar food and drink beer and Eunsang loses track of time because it's so dark where they are that there is no time.   
  
She feels this is appropriate.  
  
They eat and she talks. She talks and talks and talks. She's never talked so much. She thinks it's easier since these big blue eyes lack any spark of understanding and no sign of confusion. She talks until her voice aches in her chest and she never wonders at the absurdity of two teen girls drinking their day away in a bar.   
  
The rules have all changed and everything is topsy turvy.  
  
She feels like the girl in that story who stepped through a mirror to the other side of the world and both sides were there, everything was the way it should and also the way it shouldn't. It all felt the same because it was the same - the colors the tastes the smells.   
  
  
  
She wouldn't be surprised by anything anymore.   
  
  
  
She isn't surprised when the reassuring pats on her arm travel south and then there is a warm hand on her leg.   
  
She isn't surprised at all really. Nothing can...  
  
.... except how that hand makes her feel tethered and solid.  
  
How she begins to fear if that hand slips away, she'll float right up into nothing. She'll be bobbing on the ceiling like the forgotten trinket of a child in one moment and then she'll pop and float in pieces to the ground with no one the wiser. It isn't the hand that surprises her, it's the fear of it leaving.   
  
Eunsang looks up at the girl and does what she has done all day: she gives voice to her secret thoughts because the person sitting there, twirling circles on her knee and tying her stomach into knots, can't understand a word.  
  
It's so freeing after a lifetime of silence and secrets she doesn't quite know what to do. She's spilling out everywhere and she'd always presumed there was nothing to say.  
  
  
  
"You're hot, you know?" Eunsang swallows a large gulp of beer before continuing, missing the flush rise suddenly in her companion's cheeks. "Final Girl kind of hot. Rough around the edges and yet... not drawn in all the way. The kind of girl no one expects at the beginning of the movie because she's the Hot Girl's cousin or sister or something and then everyone is dead and everyone's horrified because monsters aren't supposed to win and then  _you_  come in out of no where and everyone cheers and say they noticed you the whole time."  
  
Eunsang doesn't notice the girl's eyes narrow a bit in parts of her speech.  
  
She's too busy imagining the girl with an ax in her hand, her eyes ablaze, and she thinks: yes.  
  
So what the dream is dead. The one that had a fairy tale ending. She preferred the dark ones anyway. The old ones they didn't edit for children where the fall from the tower makes the princess blind and mad.  
  
Well she is not blind. Not anymore.  
  
But she is mad.  
  
Mad in every way.  
  
  
  
  
"You're like the kind of girl that gets hotter with blood splattered all over your face and dark, triumphant music swelling in the background because you fucking survived and most of us wouldn't and we know that. That's why the Final Girl is never conventional, you know? She has to stand out and be invisible all the time at the same time. Hot in an unexpected, I'm gonna kick your ass but you won't see it coming kind of way. Like you."  
  
Now she noticed the girl shift a little and in her eyes a spark a ...  
  
...  
  
no....  
  
....  
  
A bleach-blonde man in a long leather duster comes up to the girl and speaks to her confidentially. Eunsang isn't sure whether to be annoyed that pays her no mind at all.  
  
Except that suddenly the girl is staring at her quizzically, as if trying to decide something. And the blonde man is watching her watch Eunsang with an agitated air.  
  
The girl says something to her. It's in English - of course - but Eunsang can tell she is very serious. (Something is shifting. Storytime is over.) She looks back and forth at them and shrugs, "I'm sorry I don't speak English... like at all."  
  
The girl looks at her hard and smiles. She hops off the stool and holds out her hand to Eunsang, repeating the phrase she had said before. Eunsang feels as though those words are vaguely familiar, or that she should know them. All she really knows is that her precious tether to the world is being held out to her and she has to choose to take it.  
  
She'd much rather be dragged along.  
  
She'd much rather be grabbed and snatched and drown in the activity but stand still.  
  
She likes sitting on the bar stool and not thinking and not making decisions.  
  
But the hand is touching her cheek lightly and the girl is smiling gently...  
  
So she jumps. And hopes the fall from the tower won't cause her to go blind.  
  
  
  
  
* * * * * * * * * * *  
  
  
  
  
Eunsang was wrong. She can still be surprised.  
  
What she was NOT expecting was to be taken into the dark alley behind the bar and for the girl to look at her with very sad eyes and punch her right in the face.  
  
She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but this - lying on the gross ground and crying again - was not at all what she had in mind.  
  
The knight is not supposed to hit the princess and run away with an older man with gross hair.  
  
Like - probably knights shouldn't be teenage girls in red bikini's either.  
  
But fuck the stories, right?  
  
Eunsang holds her cheek and cries.  
  
Not as hard as she's ever cried.  
  
But this time she's alone in an alley in a strange city and her rescuer just turned on her and so she cries.  
  
Someone comes. A man reeking of sweat and booze and... something else she'd rather not try to identify. He crouches over her and blows his grimy scent in her face, babbling in a tone he probably thinks is comforting, but she just finds annoying.  
  
She's mad.  
  
She's madder than she's ever been.  
  
She's more angry than she was even when her sister walked away with all her hopes and dreams and left her sobbing on a sidewalk. She thought she'd never be so angry again. (It was a mere matter of hours ago - oh! the futile impermanence of youth and the universe.)  
  
Just as she's worked herself up enough to lash out at the man - she imagines dragging her nails through his eyes and the blood spraying her face as she laughs - when there is a loud thud and he falls at her feet.  
  
Eunsang looks up, eyes blazing.  
  
It's the girl, with a large brick in her hand, a triumphant smirk on her face.  
  
There's no apology in her face as she looks from the still form of the man to the angry look on Eunsang's face. She nods appreciatively and drags Eunsang out of the way, calling over her shoulder.  
  
The blonde man leaps out of no where and bends over the still form of the man on the ground.  
  
Eunsang watches with mixed horror and fascination as the girl's blonde ... drinks...?  
  
"Vampire?" Eunsang whisperes.  
  
Totally wasn't expecting that either.  
  
"You have a vampire?"  
  
  
  
  
* * * * * * * * * *   
  
  
  
  
  
"Well it was either a vampire or a puppy and mom said a puppy'd pee on the carpet." The girl wrinkled her nose, "She's never met a drunk 100-something-year-old poet though. Messy."  
  
"You have a vampire."  
  
"It's not like I own him or anything I just--"  
  
"YOU SPEAK KOREAN?!"  
  
The blonde vampire perked his head up and shot them an annoyed look - his mouth covered in blood.  
  
The girl hushed her and walked her further down the alley, "Now I do."  
  
"How long was I talking?"  
  
"A couple hours I guess. Languages come pretty easy to me. I'd never tested the theory, but this should make things easier in the future I think."  
  
The vampire called hoarsely from his resting spot. And the girl responded sarcastically, flipping her long hair over her shoulder and rolling her eyes.   
  
"What did he say?"  
  
"Something about a Key... nothing important." The girl reached her long fingers up and touched the bruise swelling up on Eunsang's cheek. "Sorry about that. I didn't mean to hit you so hard, but it had to be convincing and..."  
  
"And you wanted to be able to slink away like we'd never met if I reacted badly."  
  
The girl grinned, "You were seconds from clawing that guy's face off yourself."  
  
Eunsang looked up at her for the first time and noticed little droplets of the man's blood sprinkling one side of the girl's face.  
  
  
  
  
* * * * * * * * * * *   
  
  
  
 _Our story will be scribbled on napkins in rusty diners_ , she thinks.  
  
She thinks she ought to be despondent.  
  
Instead she kisses her bloody-faced girl and sinks into it with equal part desperation and determination.  
  
So this is what happens after the credits roll.  
  
So let's be death this time maybe.  
  
It's better than the alternative.


End file.
